Univ of Chicago Pr

A fresh reading of the relationship between moral and political philosophy in Aristotle's thought.Our democracies promise the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness--at least, within the confines of the law. Yet the law is an ineffective guide to the good life; laws can be arbitrary, even immoral. What other limit, then, should direct us as we pursue our own fulfillment? In Law and the Good Life, philosopher Robert C. Bartlett examines Aristotle's consideration of this question. Rather than defer to authority, Aristotle invites us to ground ourselves in moral virtue and intellectual fulfillment, an argument he develops in both Politics and Nicomachean Ethics. As political creatures, Aristotle tells us, we are capable of moral action and therefore must embrace that capacity; at the same time, as rational creatures, we must understand what is true, even without regard to action. In taking these insights together, Bartlett offers a new reading of Aristotle's political philo

A groundbreaking account of concepts of freedom in West Indian literature and visual cultureDesiring Freedom examines post-emancipation West Indian literature and visual culture to ask how they reimagine freedom. Ranging from emancipation in the 1830s to the arrival of independence in the 1960s, Kaneesha Cherelle Parsard analyzes a literary and visual repertoire through which West Indians and Britons cast doubt on wage labor and domesticity as freedom. Whereas freedom was traditionally conceived around narratives of the self-governing individual, Parsard unearths a diverse range of materials--fiction, poetry, painting, photography, imperial correspondence, social scientific discourse, and economic history--in which this plot breaks down, finding practices of freedom in hoarding, pleasure-seeking, hustling, and siphoning. Parsard focuses on conceptions of freedom in Trinidad, British Guiana, and Jamaica. Along the way, she shows how indentured Indian women's jewelry reveals contradictio

Updated to take stock of recent developments, Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Z. Huq's prescient and insightful book shows how constitutional rules both hinder and hasten democratic decline. Around the world, autocratic leaders threaten the core structures of democratic self-rule. But democratic constitutions are not fail-proof safeguards. By looking at how such leaders exploit legal mechanisms to advance their aims, we can see how democratic constitutions can sometimes abet--and even accelerate--democratic decline. In this new edition of How to Save a Constitutional Democracy, constitutional law experts Tom Ginsburg and Aziz Z. Huq offer a powerful analysis of today's challenges while arguing that the time has come for meaningful, actionable change. This new edition takes up the torch of its predecessor, canvasing developments in the United States and other countries that have transpired since 2018. Drawing lessons from countries around the world and reflecting on the prospects for American dem

A bold new approach to medieval art and architecture's shaping of psychosomatic experience. ​ In the medieval world, experiences of fear attained a mystical significance: monks, urban publics, and even emperors pursued horror and grief to explore the limits of fantasy, sensation, and catharsis. In this book, Ravinder S. Binning examines an expansive archive ranging from poetry and scientific treatises to artistic works in ivory and crystal to recover an aesthetic tradition centered on optical tension, spatial suspense, and tactile experience. Moving between early monastic spaces in Egypt and major urban centers like Constantinople from the fourth through the thirteenth centuries, The Medieval Art of Fear shows how the psychosomatic experience of fear became the deliberate object of mystical practices, meditation, and other embodied techniques across the medieval world. The result is a powerful exploration of the aesthetic effects behind some of the medieval world's most ambiti